Amid the general celebration of billionaire Dan Gilbert’s remake of downtown, critics mutter about the dangers of letting one private businessman control so much.

On the opposite end of the ideological bandwidth, free-market zealots want to eliminate government entirely from the process of reimagining the city, advocating to turn it all over to market forces.

The best public policy lies between the extremes. In Detroit, as in many other cities, progress comes through a rich blend of both public and private engagement. Getting that mix right is the art we need to master.

Today’s successful remake of Cobo Center from leaky-roofed barn into world-class convention facility took place only when a new five-member regional authority took control of Cobo from the hapless City of Detroit and hired private professional management. Cobo now is about halfway through its $277-million upgrade and expansion.

At Eastern Market, a city-owned jewel was turned over to a nonprofit board in 2006 that hired professional managers, got foundation grants to renovate the aging market sheds and energized the tired operation into something new.

Both Detroit’s Campus Martius Park and the RiverWalk were built and are operated by nonprofit boards and professional managers in coordination with the city.

We could point to several more of these spinoffs of city functions to quasi-private professional managers — the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Historical Museum and, soon to come, new public lighting authorities, a regional transit system and perhaps a regionalized water and sewerage system.

We’ve yet to figure out how to extend these new management models to the hard-hit neighborhoods of Detroit. But certainly there are many competent managers to be found amid the 30 or so nonprofit community development organizations at work in the city’s neighborhoods that could take on more municipal-like functions.

In this remade civic space, the role of private enterprise remains crucial. Detroit isn’t going anywhere without new jobs, and to create jobs, Detroit needs the energy and vigor of its entrepreneurial class.

That means that the needle hovering between public and private solutions probably leans slightly more toward the private end of the band. A community used to looking to the government must learn to be more entrepreneurial.

Government certainly plays a role in public safety and in educating our children. But municipal governments in general prove inadequate to the task of reimagining cities. Municipal workers are too stressed, with municipal budgets too awash in red ink, to think clearly about long-term plans.

Detroit should continue exploring these new hybrid forms of civic governance, a model that blends public ownership and private enterprise in new and productive ways. Therein lies the future.